Thulani Davis

Thulani Davis is an interdisciplinary artist and historian, whose work includes poetry, theater works and cultural criticism. Her work as a dramaturg includes Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities, and Twilight Los Angeles, 1992, and foundational work on Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf. Davis wrote the libretti for Anthony Davis’s X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, and his Amistad, and many other musical works. Her forthcoming operas are The Little Rock Nine by Bernadette Speach, and Fire Across the Tracks: Tulsa 1921 by Anthony Davis. Her produced plays include: Everybody’s Ruby: Story of a Murder in Florida, The Souls of Black Folk: An Oratorio for Five Actors, the adaptation for George C. Wolfe’s production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and Where the Mississippi Meets the Amazon, with Shange and Jessica Hagedorn. Davis wrote the book and lyrics for The Sojourner Washing Society, A Musical in Gospel & Blues, with Steven Robinson. She has written the scripts for several narrative films, and award-winning documentaries. The author of six books, she has two new works: Nothin but the Music (2020), and The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom, forthcoming from Duke University Press. She is a professor and a Nellie Y. McKay Fellow in Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.